


legacy of the hungry

by lenainu



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Drabbles, Gen, Origin Stories, The First Order, i'll write this properly one day, said every fic writer ever, world-building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 09:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7527727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lenainu/pseuds/lenainu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles and world-building on the First Order, featuring our favorite storm-trooper Phasma (I mean, who's even heard of FN-2187? Exactly).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. illusions of a triumvirate

Phasma meets Brendol Hux for the first time, and he looks exactly like his father. She isn't sure what to do with that information. She is glad she has her helmet on. She has never been good at controlling her expressions.

The second thing she notices is how young he looks.

She doesn't particularly like youth, but then that's all the First Order is _(first child more like, as greedy and demanding and hungry)_ so she should probably not bother having that particular opinion.

But then, she does have a name, and that means she's allowed to think whatever the hell she wants to think.

* * *

The first time Brendol Hux meets Phasma, he doesn't think a lot of her.

Then she starts talking and if he was a lesser man, he would have wished for a helmet himself, to cover his confusion. He doesn't know how she notices it, when he's long realised that his two expressions are rage and blank disdain alone, but she does, and almost- condescends to him.

No one's done that since a gun was placed in his hands, not even the teachers, especially not the teachers.

_(which was so, so long ago that he doesn't really remember not knowing how to clean one)_

Because this is the problem: Hux has met many people who think they're better than him (sure, maybe they are but he's hungrier) but he has never met a trooper who acts like that decision was made about a thousand years ago.

Troopers are for orders, for cannons, for killing all the useless scum that Hux can't get round to killing himself _(oh, he would if he could)_. Sure, some of them commanded their own troops but they were still were always subordinate.

_(the first order is built on the old empire, after all, and some people still think they use clones. other people, like hux, don't care either way)_

But Hux hasn't made it this far by stumbling at every obstacle. So he straightens his shoulders _everything is a test_ and gives Phasma permission to remove her helmet.

She says: “No, I think not,” bizarrely prim, as if Hux has just asked to fuck her against the wall. Hey, maybe it's like that for troopers, he wouldn't know.

Hux would hate her, if he wasn't enough of a predator to recognize another of his kind.

* * *

The First Order doesn't have a history. It's both an artificial and natural result. There is no history because it is far too young for history. There is no history because nothing before the First Order was even worth mentioning.

_(they were never threatened by the resistance: it was only a relic of the past, after all, not quite real)_

But the First Order doesn't even have it's own history, it's creation myth, a bedtime story to tell to baby troopers in barracks.

This is artificial, and purposeful.

It also has the result that no one knows that Phasma was one of its founding members. Perhaps some people (idiots) would say the First Order wasn't anything before the Leader spoke.

But seriously, not even the Force is that powerful.

_(maybe people just like to believe in black and white – and no one notices the troopers' uniforms – and don't want to realize: this is just another choice, this is just another way to be)_

There are snippets of the First Order's creation myth that slip out, of course, conveyed on prideful tongue. Like the one about Brendol Hux's father being an old Imperialist insisting on bringing back that old glory that the Resistance destroyed _(that is a lie: the Force destroyed itself, and everyone else just went on dying or living)_ and so called all his inclusive society and said: let's create the First Order.

Phasma would hate Hux just for being his son, except he's nothing like him (apart from the physical resemblance of course, but she can't hold that against him: she's spent half her live removing all appearances that aren't the slick black and white lines of the troopers' suits).

She likes it when nurture proves itself over nature.

This is what she has spent her entire life trying to create.

So: she lets them say: old Hux had the idea. Of course his son is on track to becoming General (she knows Hux enough to feel vaguely offended by that by now), of course it runs in the blood.

Phasma knows well how easily blood falls, but they don't realize that there hasn't been a General before. That the post that Hux will soon occupy hasn't ever existed. That the rest of them are just figureheads.

That she wants Hux as General because it'll give her more freedom in her own actions.

_(she understands hierarchy so very well, and it goes like this: if someone else makes orders first, everyone else will think that your orders are less even though they're just afterwards)_

She wanted a General and she's going to get one.

No wonder Hux was confused at that first meeting. Never afterwards, of course. He was far too clever for that.

* * *

Then Phasma meets the so-called Kylo Ren and realizes how lightly she got off with Hux. Hux had heard about him first, for some reason that Phasma was going to track down and murder, so she went straight to his office after the meeting (it hadn't really been a meeting, she was about to shoot him down because she knew a rabid dog when she saw one, he sliced up one of her troopers, she did shoot him and then the fucking Force, the Leader said no and he hadn't spoken to her in a year, thank god, and then Kylo Ren had to go to med because there was no way Phasma would ever miss).

So: Hux had a lot to answer for. Of course, he has the audacity (fucking pup, Phasma has never stopped thinking of him as young) to say, pressing a hand against his temple: “What happened.”

Like Phasma doesn't has the headaches out of nightmares because she got the worst of it for harming- whatever Kylo Ren is supposed to be. A lot more than he is, she suspects.

She has about minus one hundred sympathy for him.

She doesn't keep the anger out of her voice when she says: “I will destroy you if you don't bother to tell me about something like that again.”

Hux doesn't lie and say that he didn't know about the new human disaster because they both can tell when he's lying.

He says: “I didn't you too would encounter each other so soon.”

Phasma's used to Hux's default, bored tone and envied it at times (very rarely) but it only infuriates her now.

Then she realizes how angry she is. She hasn't been this angry since- She doesn't know. It's not that things haven't gone wrong, things always go wrong and the best plans die instant deaths, but it's never touched her emotionally like this before.

She thinks about the new troopers that are coming next week and not the one lying dead because of nothing. She thinks about how she chose Hux, how she does actually like him, how she was so relieved that someone else actually understood what the First Order should be.

“I shot him in the leg-” _Instead of the head._ “-so I could torture him later.”

It was only a decade of working alongside him that let Phasma notice the slightest hint of a smirk on Hux's face.

 


	2. what's a nation?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Come to the dark side.  
> Or: all the clever people know that morals are just tools in the right hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a lot more snippet-y than the previous one, but I'm just sorting out things in my head and looking for rabbit holes to jump down.

_The question is: do you want to remember?_

Because when you have to ask that question, it means that once upon a time, you wanted to forget.

_Here is another question: are we truly instinctively moral, or it only a cultural mechanism?_

_Here is one answer: that was the first time FN-2187 was sent on a front-line mission._

The program was supposed to eliminate individuality in any and every shape and form. But the best made plans meant that the program did reward the individuals. The individuals who were vicious and fast and clever. And unthinkingly obedient to authority, but that was a given. What was the point of a trooper, if not to obey?

The stolen ones could be seen as a pity project, or a mercy, or an atrocity. Because the First Order had been destroying planets long before Starkiller – _have you heard of Trillia? -_ and so the children ( _not children, soldiers_ ) were the ones spared. Isn't this kinder than the God of the Old Testament? How lucky are the living.

Here is another story: once every trooper came out of a vat.

Until it was realised that thief is far cheaper than creation. It is like this: every birth is precious ( _they say on Earth_ ) but there are trillions of life forms stretching across the galaxy, and the galaxy is never big enough for them all.

Life is precious, but press a cloth over the baby's mouth when the dry months ache open too long.

Or, life is precious, but everyone is selfish.

* * *

There is limit to when troopers are taken. After a certain developmental stage (which of course varies between species, but troopers are mainly humans, that parasite of a species) it's one step forwards and two steps backwards. Even if they don't remember clearly, a child will still remember the scent of their mother, the laughs of siblings, a family.

Troopers do not have family. They have regiments, and those are not the same at all.

Or: dogs snap all the more, the lower they are in the pack.

Do not think troopers are _all in this together_. Theirs is not an alliance, but a shared background, a shared school. And in the end, that doesn't count for a lot.

Which is why, when someone says: _did you hear about FN-2187,_ another trooper turns them over to reconditioning.

* * *

Rey remembers. She remembers her past, her parents abandoning her _why why why,_ the years stretching endless into the desert.

Finn forgets everything of _before_ , and wishes he remembers. But that only brings back the old question: _why did you want to forget?_

Because conditioning always works alongside the psyche and the psyche says: _you could have been stolen, but you have been thrown away. You could have been sold. You could have been unwanted._

So, you forget. There no point in the past, anyway, you know that. The First Order hates the past, hungry teeth and sharp eyes cutting into the future _we will create the new world._

It almost sounds beautiful, like that: _everyone in their place, doing what they are able to do, in a state of eternal peace and clean streets._

But then dreams are always more beautiful, and a hundred times simpler than the waking world.

* * *

Conditioning is a fine balancing act, a delicate, fragile thing. A dance between nature and nurture. For example, humans are exceedingly tactile beings – _touch me touch me -_ to the extent that withholding contact is an old kind of torture.

Contact has a strange way of forming _tribes_ and this is never what the conditioning should do, because tribes are always smaller than the majesty that is the First Order.

So with contact, they go: when you fight is the only time you can touch. And then even that can be reduced, once the troopers are old enough to wear their armour all the time, so much that they forget what each other looks like. And that is the taste of success: when troopers look at each other and only see a white carcass of an uniform

Because caring isn't a weakness, whatever the Sith preach, it's a strength. It gives strength, so that the holder is able to change, to break away.

Without that strength, your army will be eternal. They will not even know the word _traitor._

It is always beautiful and terrible at the same time.

* * *

The First Order is a beast of the future. No one there has a past, so why would troopers expect one?

* * *

_Here's another question: would the First Order have emerged without Snoke?_

_The answer is, of course: yes._

_And after that answer, there is another question: would the Resistance still fight that other First Order?_

* * *

Here is a fact that the Resistance would dislike being spread: there is a percentage of the program that are orphans, the children that no one misses, the small forms huddling in the scant shelter of an alcove, the children that even the Resistance, in all their morality, cannot care for.

Here is another fact: only some of them are orphans because of the First Order. After all, no one ever accused the Resistance of being peaceful.

* * *

_What are you fighting for?_

That is not the question.

The question is: _what aren't you fighting for?_

We are all starving. We have been starving for centuries, and no one can hold us back.

* * *

They aren't allowed individual possessions, except their armour. It's specially made, after all, fitted and fine-tuned into a killing machine.

All they own is their armour. And this is why sometimes, they say: _FN-2187 wasn't a stormtrooper._ Because he cast aside, so easily, the only thing they had.

Somewhere else, a trooper smiles when FN-2187 is cut down by Kylo Ren, as he lies dying on the sharp, cold ground. _If only he had been wearing his armour..._

* * *

They all act like FN-2187 is the first holder of the title: traitor.

It's almost enough to soothe his fury. Of course, FN-2187 is the first traitor in his reign, but before. Before, when the program was started, as it grew. Oh, of course there were traitors, fleeing at the first chance.

Fleeing until a blaster burnt a hole in their backs.

So, the truth is: there were always traitors.

Also, the truth is: the Resistance and the stormtroopers never knew.

They never knew, and something bloody curls in his chest, whispering: _make them regret it._

Because the Resistance and the stormtroopers never thought it was possible, so they never knew there were procedures in place for when it happens.

They will regret it.

They will regret forgetting that this isn't a battle of strength, but of intelligence.

 


	3. once upon a time

Here's the thing about humans.

They can't live without stories. This is non-negotiate and impossible to hold back. Say _you have no stories_ and they'll make up their own. They've been doing it for centuries.

Humans can't live without stories, so here's what you do: you make up the stories and they lap them up, dying of thirst.

And they don't question whether the stories are true or not, or good or not. They are stories. That's all they ever needed to be.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> important.


End file.
